2014-08-08: A new challenge
Those reading this journal may have noticed that my rate of posting has
dropped a bit in the past few years, and quite a lot in the past year.
One of the major reasons for this was work, which had been getting more
bureaucratic, more stressful, less trusting, and more fearful. After this
got drastically worse in the past six months, I finally decided enough was
enough and took advantage of a good opportunity to do something different.
I will be joining Dropbox's site reliability engineering team in a week
and a half (which means that I'll be working on their servers, not on
the product itself). It will take a few months to settle in, but
hopefully this will mean a significant improvement to my stress levels and
a lot of interesting projects to work on.
I'm taking advantage of this change to inventory the various things I'm
currently committed to and let go of some projects to make more space in
my life. There are also a variety of software projects that I was
maintaining as part of my job at Stanford, and I will be orphaning many of
those packages. I'll make another journal post about that a bit later.
For Debian folks, I am going to be at Debconf, and hope to meet many of
you there. (It's going to sort of be my break between jobs.) In the long
run, I'm hoping this move will let me increase my Debian involvement.
In the long run, I expect most of my free software work, my reviews, and
the various services I run to continue as before, or even improve as my
stress drops. But I've been at Stanford for a very long time, so this is
quite the leap into the unknown, and it's going to take a while before I'm
sure what new pattern my life will fall into.
2014-08-09: Orphaning some software packages
As mentioned in my previous message, I'm orphaning
various software packages that I was maintaining as part of my job at
Stanford, or that for some other reason I'm no longer using directly. My
goal is to free up some time and space for new work projects at my new
employer, for other hobbies, and to take better care of other projects
that I'm not orphaning.
The following software packages are now orphaned, and marked as such on
their web pages:
I'm also stepping down from Debian package maintenance for the OpenAFS and
Shibboleth packages, and have already notified the relevant communities.
For the Debian packages, and for the above software packages, I will
continue to provide security support until someone else can take them
over.
WebAuth is going to be in a state of transition as noted on its page:
My successor at Stanford will be continuing maintenance and development,
but that person hasn't been hired yet, and it will take some time for them
to ramp up and start making new releases (although there may be at least
one interim release with work that I'm finishing now). It's therefore not
strictly orphaned, but it's noted that way on my software pages until
someone else at Stanford picks it up.
Development of the other packages that I maintain should continue as
normal, with a small handful of exceptions. The following packages are
currently in limbo, since I'm not sure if I'll have continued use for
them:
I'm not very happy with the current design of either kadmin-remctl or
wallet, so if I do continue to maintain them (and have time to work on
them), I am likely to redesign them considerably.
For all of my packages, I've been adding clones of the repository to
GitHub as an additional option besides my
personal Git repository server. I'm of two minds about using (and locking
myself into) more of the GitHub infrastructure, but repository copies on
GitHub felt like it might be useful for anyone who wanted to fork or take
over maintenance. I will be adding links to the GitHub repositories to
the software packages for things that are in Git.
If you want to take over any of the orphaned software packages, feel free.
When you're ready for the current software pages to redirect to its new
home, let me know.
2014-08-28: git-pbuilder 1.33
git-pbuilder is a script to integrate git-buildpackage with pbuilder or
cowbuilder. My long-term hope is to rewrite it in Python and just
incorporate it into git-buildpackage's source base directly, but in the
meantime I've been maintaining it as a separate script.
This new release is a relatively minor bug fix. git-pbuilder has always
removed the *_source.changes file built as part of the pbuilder process,
since this file is normally useless. It's used to generate the source
package to move into the chroot, but then the build in the chroot normally
regenerates the Debian source package. The *_source.changes file hangs
around with invalid checksums and just confuses matters, so git-pbuilder
has always deleted it.
However, Debian is now increasing support for source-only uploads, which
means that source-only builds might now be interesting. One can do a
source-only build with gbp buildpackage -S. But that also
generates a *_source.changes file, one that's actually useful, and
git-pbuilder was deleting that as well. This release, thanks to work by
Guido Günther, refrains from deleting this file when doing a source-only
build.
You can get the latest release of git-pbuilder from my
scripts distribution page.
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